Opinion | The High School We Can't Log Off From - The New York Times - 0 views
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It appears we’re in the midst of yet another Twitter backlash. Marquee users have been slowly backing away from their feeds (or slipping off the grid entirely)
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last week, Twitter’s stock plunged by more than 20 percent after the company reported a decline in monthly users
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The arguments for defection are at this point familiar: Twitter is a dark reservoir of hatred, home to the diseased national id. It turns us into our worst selves — dehumanizing us, deranging us, keying us up, beating us down, turning us into shrieking outrage monkeys
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It uncomplicates complicated discussion; stealth-curates our news; hijacks our dopamine systems, carrying us off on a devil’s quest for ever more dime bags of retweets and likes.
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Twitter is changing us — regressing us — in ways developmental psychologists would find weirdly recognizable.
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the “imaginary audience” phenomenon in adolescents — the idea that teenagers somehow see themselves as stars of their own productions, believing themselves to be watched by an eager, if sometimes judgmental, public.
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On Twitter, you actually are living your life on a stage. “It’s the imaginary audience come to life,
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political and opinion Twitter has made many otherwise well-adjusted people a bit obsessed with their new publics, checking just a bit too frequently whether that brilliant aperçu they just typed has begun its viral zoom
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Whenever anyone proposes boycotting social media altogether, Mr. Shirky always answers: Fine. Got a way to do that while protecting #blacklivesmatter and #metoo?
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described high school to me as “a large box of strangers.” The kids don’t necessarily share much in common, after all; they just happen to be the same age and live in the same place. So what do they do in this giant box to give it order, structure? They divide into tribes and resort to aggression to determine status.
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the faster the medium is, the more emotional it gets. Twitter, as we know, is pretty fast, and therefore runs pretty hot.
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Our self-regulation deserts us (been there); our prefrontal cortex, responsible for executive function and impulse control, goes offline; we become reward-seeking Scud missiles, addicts in search of a fix.
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We become, in other words, teenagers, who are notoriously poor models of self-regulation — in large part because their prefrontal cortices are still developing and their dopamine circuits are pretty busy seeking stimulation
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The psychologist Laurence Steinberg describes adolescents as “cars with powerful accelerators and weak brakes
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Do we really want something so important, so vital, as our political conversation to be conducted in a teenage register and defined by teenage behaviors? Do we really want to have this discussion on a medium that makes us lose sight of our adult selves?
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The same can be said of Twitter. It’s the ultimate large box of strangers. As in high school, Twitter denizens divide into tribes and bully to gain status; as in high school, too-confessional musings and dumb mistakes turn up in the wrong hands and end in humiliation.
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But something is wrong with this ecosystem. Too often, as Jaron Lanier notes in his recent jeremiad on social media, we think we’re controlling it when it’s controlling us.
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the best response to adolescent deviltry, tough as it is, is to let kids make their own mistakes and hope that one day they realize they’re inflicting harm.